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Thursday, May 25, 2017

Edison, Bukowski and four dollars

A while back I was
at the Mobil getting gas with my coffee and ran into a guy I know who had
bought one fly from me at a fly show the previous winter. We were about two
months into striper season so I asked him how the fishing had been. He told me
that he had not caught any striped bass on the fly I sold him and asked if I
offered a money-back guarantee. I choked a little on my coffee and inquired
where he had been fishing. He told me the location and reiterated that the fly
had not caught any fish. Either time he had been out.

“Either time, as in
twice?”

“Yeah, both times,
nothing…I don’t think it works.”

I suddenly thought
of Thomas Edison saying, “I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways
that won’t work” when describing his work to improve the filament in the incandescent
light bulb.

I reached for my
phone to show my customer pictures of a dozen fish recently caught on the same fly
he was questioning but chose the high road and bit my tongue. I thanked him for
his business and gave him back his four dollars.

Half of it in coins.

Just because.

I thought about that
encounter a couple of mornings ago as I sat in traffic on the commute to The
Cube. Cruising north at seven miles per hour I watched people in the other cars
applying face paint, taking selfies, updating their global status and one dude
rolling a number. Traffic came to a halt as a radio commercial touted the
“immediate results” of some magic pill. Instant gratification seems to dictate
most of what we do. Mass media, marketing and advertising, social media
influencers, hashtags – we’re all manipulated by the profit in impatience.

We’re messed up, I
get it. At times I’m both a perpetrator and a casualty of the game and to be
contrite I’ll be checking Blogger an hour after I post this to see how many
views it gets.

There is a phrase we
use in fishing about a particular catch being a “fish of a thousand casts.” Much
like Edison and the carbonized filament, there are times that the difference
between fishing and catching is the result of persistence. Despite all the
fancy gear, the electronics technology and real-time information available
today, in the end, it comes down to putting in the time, cast after cast, sometimes day after day.

A friend of mine
from Nantucket, Chris Lydon, recently sent me an email that illustrates this.

“I have been dying to get a bass on those
foam popper flies since last season. I don’t know why, but it’s been a personal
mission. I spent a lot of time at the end of last season searching for my final
bass with them to no avail. I’ve been tying it on a lot this year so far. I
have had countless missed strikes, explosions and tail swirls but yesterday I
finally got the deal done. All the heartache was worth it. In my opinion, there
is no more exciting way to catch a bass than watching it come up and clobber a
popper.”

I have no idea in what
context Bukowski made his remark. If you've read Bukowski, well, use your imagination. I’d like to think it’s universal and can be
applied to just about anything, especially fishing.

Merriam - Webster
lists one definition of art as “skill acquired by experience, study, or
observation.” The same could be said of fly fishing.